March 26, 2006

Introducing the Business Certainty Blog

Last week I began consulting Cesura on its new blog, Business Certainty. Cesura works with Software as Service (SaaS) providers to eliminate the intermittent disruptions that end-users experience with on-demand applications.

Every day I'm using more and more Web 2.0 applications and I love the ease of use. I was fortunate enough to get in on Writerly before Google bought them and closed the beta test to new comers. However, on Friday Writerly began to freeze and I had to move quickly to get my clients and all my vendors to start saving copies of all our critical documents on our hard drives. We didn't lose anything. fortunately, but there a was a panicky moment of realization that if you live by the web-based application, you might well die by it. Losing those docs would have caused me an instant aneurysm.

Which brings me back to Cesura and its commitment to what they call "Business Certainty." Brian Reed, the VP of marketing wrote in his first post on the new blog that SaaS providers must ultimately meet the performance and reliability issues of both the business and its user community.

Brian writes that meeting those needs:

"...doesn’t just mean deliver 5 nines on the back-end.... that means deliver an end user experience on the front end that is free from the intermittent problems and unpredictable slowdowns that frustrates our users and prevents them from easily getting their job done. And in the on-demand world, where software applications run in a remote data center cage and users run scattered on the other side of the Internet cloud, this can become quite an adventure.

"In an effort to recognize this challenge, we have coined the term
Business Certainty. An organization achieves Business Certainty when it
can confidently and predictably deliver a reliable on-demand end-user
experience so that all users can easily conduct business. In other
words, make this as reliable as the dial tone so people can just get
their job done -- no frustration, no yelling, no throwing things."

Don't know about you, but I've done a lot of yelling and throwing things when it comes to a certain web-based data base that almost all the PR pros subscribe to. Somehow it always seems to hang at the worst possible moment, right when you need it the most.

Hopefully as the Web matures, more and more SaaS providers will begin to take care of the users on the front-end, and not just the hardware on the back end.